Jack and Fortunatus checked into a nicer hotel and ordered a double stacked hamburger for Jack. From a cooler in the trunk of Jack's car, Fortunatus produced several blood bags. With no other humans around to question his red eyes, he warmed up several and indulged himself.
"I want to look at the body, at Derrick, again tomorrow and I wanna know how he died," Jack said. "I want to have as much information to give Ronan as possible."
"What if he does not wish to help?
"I'm not giving him an option."
"Are you going to call Crow?"
"Yeah, something is going on. Olive said lots of magical lines where swirling around my school. What happens next? We find Derrick dead in a field. Something tells me they're related."
"I am curious about whether we could convince Olive to cast a spell of TrueSeeing on the body?" Fortunatus mused.
Jack got up from his bed and started pacing leaving his burger unfinished.
"Calm down, Jack. Do not let yourself be overcome with anxiety."
"I can't help it, Fort. I feel like this is just the beginning. Something bad is happening but I don't know what it is."
"Becoming agitated only clouds your thoughts. Be calm," Fortunatus said from the twin bed he lounged on littered with blood bags.
"You're right, you're right," Jack said. He took a deep breath and forced himself to lie down on the other bed.
"We will get new information in the morning."
Jack nodded. He closed his eyes and thought of the turning constellations of a world he once visited as a child and drifted off to sleep. Zephyr snored softly on the pillow next to him, a washcloth covering her. The wolf dreams came for Jack and he slipped into his other skin and raced across the grassy Plane under strange stars.
The golden sun rose to light the Material Plane, and Jack and Fortunatus headed to the police station with Fortunatus bundled in Jack's trunk. As Jack drove he mulled over his dream unable to shake the feeling of the hunt. The hunt in the wolf dream for something or someone...maybe Ronan? Maybe someone else?
Twenty minutes later, when they drove into Dorian, Jack headed straight for the police station. In sixty years, the building remained static on the outside with little change to its gray demeanor other than a new wing on the left side and more modern cars parked in front. Here, in this gray box of a building, Jack's grandmother, Sophie, experienced her first contacted with the spirit child, Cora. Here, in a building soaked with suffering, his grandparents, Sophie and Benj, discovered their pregnancy with Crow, the only known Dhampir in the Planes.
Jack called Blaine from the car, and Blaine let them in the back door of the station to keep comments about Fortunatus, in his long dark coat, hood and gloves, to a minimum. In his office, with the door closed for privacy, they related how they had found the body.
"So you don't know how he died, but you know it was a magical death?" Blaine asked.
"Yep."
Zephyr sat on a stack of papers kicking her legs. The grim conversation kept her silent.
"And what should I expect from an autopsy?"
"I am not sure," Fortunatus said, steepling his fingers.
"You said you're going to call this Ronan, who inherited Manson's powers, so I'm guessing that a quick glance over the body doesn't give you a cause of death like 'shot in the chest' or something?"
YOU ARE READING
Inheritance
ParanormalMass murder, stolen powers, controlled inheritances, and Ronan stuck in the middle with his own powers recently inherited from a serial killer. How's a cop supposed to use powers abused by a serial killer? Jack, a kid with several notches already...
